A scene in the 1909 British Gaumont film How Percy Won the Beauty Competition shows the title character eyeing up the rows of wigs on display in the windows of Fox's Theatrical Wig-maker and Costumier. The setting is a real street outside a shop in Covent Garden, which was well known among people working in London's entertainment industry, and which also had a reputation for supplying 'men of all classes' with disguises that could make them unrecognisable even to their closest relations. 1 In the film, Percy enters the shop and emerges seconds later, changed out of his three-piece suit, flat cap, cigar and walking stick and into a smart, rather sporty woman's jacket and skirt, a fur stole and muff and a broad-brimmed hat decorated with feathers. Outside the shop, a small crowd has gathered to watch the scene, which comes to an end as a salesman escorts Percy into a waiting car. Percy, ladylike, smiles politely and bids him goodbye. As the film's title suggests, Percy's aim in effecting this transformation is to enter a beauty contest for women and pocket the cash prize. The crowd of curious pedestrians and shopkeepers leaning out of their doorways adds to the sense that this is a practical joke, in which Percy (played by the film's director, Alfred Collins) is seeing how many people he can fool. This is underlined by the final shot of Collins, out of his wig and feathered hat, laughing as he shows off his winnings to the camera. The practical joke element was taken even further in another British comedy about beauty competitions produced by Cricks and Martin a year earlier, Lord Algy's Beauty Show (1908), in which a troupe of male actors decide to dress as women in order to enter a similar contest, one of them wearing a monkey suit under his outfit and 'cutting a very grotesque figure', as one trade reviewer noted. 2 In its use of men's cross-dressing for comic effect, How Percy Won the Beauty Competition is indicative of a widespread practice in early British cinema. In total, I have identified more than eighty British films made before 1918 that feature crossdressing performances, and that survive either as archival prints or as records in early filmmakers' catalogues and magazine listings. 3 Like Percy, the majority of these films (around three-quarters) involve men dressing as women. Also in common with Percy, most of these films narrativise gender-crossing as part of the plot, although there are
